Month: April 2009

Here is a passage from the encyclical Gaudium Et Spes:

I do not refer to my religious convictions very often in the torture debate precisely because I want to make an argument for secular society, on secular and moral grounds, and want to persuade more than Catholics.

But I do want to say that the Church gets to the core of the issue – the true definition of torture here:

whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as

mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself;

The point here is not to make some deranged distinction between waterboarding a human being with a cloth rather than cellophane, for twenty seconds rather than forty, or, God help us, 183 times in a row rather than 100 times in a row. People who define torture by these absurd qualifications are missing the forest for a stack of twigs. The point of torture is to violate the integrity of the human person and to coerce the will itself.

So when Cliff May writes the following paragraph, he is explicitly describing the very infamy the church understands as torture:

We now know that Islamists believe their religion forbids them to cooperate with infidels — until they have reached the limit of their ability to endure the hardships the infidel is inflicting on them.* In other words: Imagine an al-Qaeda member who would like to give his interrogators information, who does not want continue fighting, who would prefer not to see more innocent people slaughtered. He would need his interrogators to press him hard so he can feel that he has met his religious obligations — only then could he cooperate. 

How else can you interpret what was done to Qahtani, Zubaydah or KSM other than "attempts to coerce the will itself." You will also note how high up the list of atrocities torture is. This was not just a crime; it was a sin.

The legend of the pro-war anti-Jihadist blogosphere, Charles Johnson, founder of the Little Green Footballs site, has had enough of the far right:

Johnson supported Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008, but he spent some of the campaign attacking anti-Obama conspiracy theorists… “I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watch some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

It's a fascinating piece of political subcultural reporting from Dave Weigel. The times are changing.

The Miss California kerfuffle was played out from the start, but, well, food for thought (and love the cat):

Slate re-prints (re-digitizes?) SERE graduate David Morris's testimony:

Robert Solow reviews Richard Posner's new book, A Failure of Capitalism:

There is no doubt that Posner has been an independent thinker, never a passive follower of a party line. Neither is there any doubt that his independent thoughts have usually led him to a position well to the right of the political economy spectrum. The Seventh Circuit is based in Chicago, and Posner has taught at the University of Chicago. Much of his thought exhibits an affinity to Chicago school economics: libertarian, monetarist, sensitive to even small matters of economic efficiency, dismissive of large matters of equity, and therefore protective of property rights even at the expense of larger and softer "human" rights.

But not this time, at least not at one central point, the main point of this book.

Here is one of several statements he makes:

Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government's myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry, the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism.

If I had written that, it would not be news. From Richard Posner, it is.

Posner will be blogging for The Atlantic about his book starting in May.

(Photo by Janet Waters)

Alan Jacobs wonders about the future of memoir:

From a piece by Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber about Obama's governing style:

Derek Thompson agrees.

Greenwald:

For me, this has absolutely nothing to do with party. I’d be as insistent with any president who authorized torture of whatever party. And there is very good reason to believe that Pelosi knew a lot more than she has said. She should be investigated as well.

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," -  an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency in July 2002.

So the military knew it was torture and said it was torture. Because it was torture. And the United States has statutory and treaty obligations to investigate all charges of torture and to prosecute the guilty. Or are we to withdraw from the treaty that Ronald Reagan signed and championed?